Austin Burkhart

Replaced handwritten field reporting with a GPS-accurate iOS app, deployed to 10,000+ track engineering users.

Track engineering teams across the BNSF network were capturing critical inspection data on a stack of handwritten forms — slow, error-prone, and missing precise location data the engineering team needed. I led the primary research, job-shadowing crews in the field to map their day-to-day workflow and pain points, then partnered with Apple's design team in Cupertino in a co-design workshop to prototype a mobile replacement. Working alongside our software engineers, we shipped a single iOS experience that consolidated multiple forms and added GPS-accurate measurements, reaching 10,000+ users and giving the engineering team far sharper track data to act on.

New customer portal experience for transportation software with 20,000+ daily users.

BNSF's customer-facing digital experience had grown into a cluttered sprawl of overlapping tools with no clear roadmap. As Product Owner, I ran the primary research, competitor benchmarking, and a cross-department design sprint to define a simplified, personalized, pipeline-focused vision — then built and sold a 2023–2025 roadmap to executive leadership. The work secured capital project funding and decommissioned 10+ redundant customer apps, reducing maintenance cost and setting the direction the portal still follows today.

Owned a repeatable innovation pipeline and ran company-wide design-thinking events that surfaced fundable proofs-of-concept.

BNSF had no consistent way to turn frontline ideas into validated, fundable products. I designed and owned the Trackathon innovation pipeline end to end — sourcing executive-backed business challenges, facilitating design-thinking workshops for 200+ participants, and running the event through delivery. The 2020 virtual event grew developer participation 490% and total participation 296%, earned a Net Promoter Score of 55, and produced multiple production applications and 2 patents filed with the US Patent Office.

Merged three teams into one 24/7 support desk and led enterprise change management.

Customer Support was spread across three separate teams with no second-level structure to tackle recurring defects. I defined and stood up a transformed second-level support model with new roles approved by HR, directly leading 8 team members across a 24/7 Advanced Support Desk, while driving change management for major platform rollouts (Genesys Cloud, IVR authentication). I also accelerated the team's #1 enhancement request to eliminate an estimated 125,000 support cases per year.